Costume drama ... Mark Wallinger with a still from Sleeper in the background. Photograph: Dave Thompson/PA

At one point during Mark Wallinger's film Sleeper, his funny and sad night-time meander around a Berlin gallery dressed in a bear suit, he stops wandering and plonks himself down on the floor. Outside, two passers-by are pointing in his direction; one pulls out a camera and starts shooting quizzically away. Wallinger - more correctly, I guess, his bear persona - simply sits with his back to the window, oblivious, apparently exhausted by it all.

As the artist (this time dressed in human costume) was whisked past me this evening, seconds after being given the Turner prize live on television, in the middle of being pointed at and poked once more, the moment seemed to be re-enacting itself. Wallinger simply looked a bit dazed, undeniably pleased but vaguely befuddled. It was hard not to feel a touch sorry for him, in a way. He didn't even have a bear suit to hide inside.

I admit I didn't feel sorry for too long: it must be a wonderful thing to win the Turner and be feted as Britain's leading contemporary artist, particularly if you've been, as Wallinger has, nominated once before but missed out (and it's all very well to dismiss the Turner as a corrupt horse-race if you've won it rather than lost). But the media-dictated choreography of the announcement - a brief sputter of TV lights, a short spot on Channel 4, then the waiting cameras and questions - did make the whole thing feel curiously empty, a clinically staged ritual meant to seem important but whose point had somehow been lost en route.

Funnily enough it wasn't the art that felt phoney this year (quite the reverse: breaking out of the throng to the exhibition upstairs seemed like an illicit treat), but all the synchronised, spotlit farrago that surrounded it, somehow all the more obvious in the intimate surroundings of Tate Liverpool. Maybe we in the media should do everyone a favour and ignore the Turner prize altogether for a while, so as to let everyone work out what is really meant to be going on. If it is even possible to work out what's meant to be going on.

In any case, tonight the decision felt like the right one, a just reward for Wallinger and his work - but also a celebration of anti-war protestor Brian Haw, whose dogged encampment outside parliament, painstakingly recreated by Wallinger inside the cavernous galleries of Tate Britain, was paid tribute. The artist made a point of thanking his muse during his speech, and I sort of hope the compliment has been returned - if only because Wallinger carefully remade what the government, and the Metropolitan police, so grimly tore apart.

As it happened my friend and I caught a glimpse of Haw afterwards in the crowd, calmly sipping champagne amid the art-world hoopla, and we found ourselves rushing up to congratulate him too. He looked pleased, in a distant kind of way. There are, after all, bigger things to worry about.